A million of anything is hard to imagine, but do your best to picture a million penguins gathered near a research station in Antarctica.

These migratory creatures have come to mate, yet there’s no need for you to imagine that. Just what else besides eggs gets produced while they’re there.

Poop.

Lots and lots of penguin poop, and the poop they pass is full of nitrogen, which breaks down into ammonia. The result is an odor — comparable to certain bathroom-cleaning products — and remains for weeks after the penguins move on.

I’m asking you to imagine this because of something I’ve asked you to do in the past to help your health and fitness that has recently helped mine. To hunt for connections, however unlikely they may be.

Maybe even as unlikely as the connection discovered by the research team working out of the aforesaid research station and published in the May 2025 issue of Communications Earth & Environment. That the ammonia ultimately produced by the penguin poop reacts with gases created by marine plankton and causes fog and clouds to form.

Clouds that could — though the study’s lead author acknowledges in a May 2025 Science article it could act otherwise — serve as an insulating layer and keep Antarctica’s ice sheets from melting. And by logical extension, clouds like these could be what the other continents need to keep thousands of miles of beach above sea level — as well as what’s needed to keep Carbon County’s summertime temps more like Canada’s and less like Colombia’s.

That’s a very good thing. So is sleeping better at night, not bruising as easily as before, and improving your skin quality.

All three have happened for me recently by making an unlikely connection. The story, however, is a bit involved.

Though I prefer coffee in the morning, I enjoy drinking green tea and know doing so bolsters my immune system while mitigating the aging process. So for about 30 years and until just after Thanksgiving, I drank three cups of the decaffeinated stuff sometime after supper.

Getting up three or four times a night to urinate seemed to be a small price to pay for the pleasure of the beverage and its health benefits — especially since I would fall back to sleep immediately and awaken in the morning feeling fine.

Last year sometime after Halloween, though, the three to four times a night became five or more. Moreover, naturally waking up a few minutes before the alarm clock sounded, which had been a virtual guarantee for me, became a rarity, as well as that feeling of being raring to go.

That’s why I stopped drinking decaffeinated green tea or any fluids after supper. Around New Year’s Day, I was back to my prior nighttime urinary pattern.

But if I was going to go without any liquid after supper every night, I expected better. I realized something else had to be at work here, but was stumped as to what.

And then during one middle-of-the-night urination near Presidents Day, I detected a slight smell, one reminiscent of certain bathroom-cleaning products containing ammonia. But I had yet to clean the bathroom that week.

While you’re probably thinking now’s the time to consult a doctor, I consulted my food journal instead and made an unlikely connection. A few days before the first uptick in nighttime urination, I started eating a sports-performance bar at night that’s 75 percent protein by calories and had continued to do so.

Now I need to be clear here. My protein ingestion, according to the RDA and many experts, was already way too high well before I started eating those bars, albeit intentionally.

Sometime in my early 30s, I read about John Parrillo’s nutritional beliefs for optimal body composition. Since having a low body fat percentage helps a cyclist climb hills and I fancied myself a climber, I incorporated elements of his suggested diet into mine while still remaining a lacto-ovo vegetarian.

I was able to do so by creating a healthy, high-protein chocolate spread to spoon into dry cereal and ate that twice a day. Eating that snack and egg-white omelets kept my protein ingestion at about 40 percent of total calories on weekdays.

But then I got hooked on the taste of David bars and started eating one of those a day while keeping my calorie count the same.

It’s my guess that at that point, I reached my own personal protein-ingestion tipping point. (Which seems plausible based on a 2020 Journal of Clinical Medicine study that found a link between protein ingestion at dinner and late-night urination.)

Long story short, within a month of reducing my weekday protein ingestion to around 30 percent, I was only getting up twice a night to urinate.

To replace those protein calories, I did something John Parrillo tells hardcore bodybuilders not do: eat fruit — and another unexpected connection was the result.

Within days, my body wasn’t bruising as easily and overall the quality of my skin had improved noticeably.